The Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesperson, Max Wilkinson MP, told his party conference this week: “Before the [Brexit] referendum, not a single small boat crossed the Channel.”
This just isn’t true.
The government only publishes official data on small boat arrivals from 2018 onwards, and the number did rise substantially in the 2020s, after the UK left the EU. But there is plenty of evidence of crossings taking place before that, and before the referendum in June 2016.
A 2020 report from the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration says that the Home Office “was aware of isolated cases of migrants arriving in the UK clandestinely by small boats before 2014-15” and mentions “nine confirmed incidents of migrants reaching the UK having crossed the Channel in a small vessel” between July 2014 and May 2016.
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In April 2016, the Telegraph reported that migrants were paying people smugglers to transport them across the Channel in small boats—and Border Force vessels had been patrolling the Channel for this reason since at least August 2014.
The International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants data also records several incidents of drowning on the “Mainland Europe to the UK” route in 2014, 2015 and early 2016.
Indeed the Migration Observatory has said reports of these types of Channel crossing “go back over 50 years”.
By way of example, we can see that politicians said asylum seekers had been trying to cross the Channel in rubber dinghies back in December 2001. Eight Pakistani men arrived in Sandwich Bay, Kent, in August 1967, which the home secretary at the time said was the second incident of its kind.
There’s even a report of a “Jewish refugee” from continental Europe crossing the Channel in 1938. One report at the time suggested that with illegal landings generally “the favourite method is to come ashore in a rowing boat with the appearance of having been out for a short sea-trip”.
The evidence does suggest that small boat crossings became much more common after the Brexit referendum, and specifically after 2018. A report from the Home Affairs Committee says that until 2018, “irregular migration on a substantial scale focused heavily on ferry and rail routes, with only a handful crossing the Channel in small boats each year”.
Full Fact has approached Mr Wilkinson for comment.